It’s all right to let our children get messy from time to time

“WASH your hands!” is a freqently heard in our house.

“But I have,” comes the blatantly false reply.

Then follows a five-minute standoff, a 10-minute negotiation, and a three-minute lie-on-the-floor tantrum before soap actually touches skin.

It’s incredibly wearing but we persist because although tummy bugs will inevitably happen, we want to reduce the chances.

But how much hygiene is too much hygiene?

I cringed yesterday and screamed “don’t lick your hands” across a playground when I saw Luke doing just that after he’d been handling a football which had been played with on grass where God knows what had been.

But as soon as I screamed I realised how futile a gesture it was because the damage might already have been done.

“Well, he’ll have a good immune system,” I said to myself.

But that’s the tricky part for parents, knowing when to expose them to germs and when to protect them.

In 1989 Professor David Strachan published a study including his “hygiene hypothesis”, which suggested that a lack of exposure to germs and infections in childhood was to blame for the rise in the number of allergies and possibly inflammatory bowel disease and multiple sclerosis.

The theory is that without proper “training” in fighting the common microbes that people should be exposed to, the immune system can overreact when it detects something, hence inflammatory diseases and allergies.

That’s a very basic way of describing it and, as far as I can tell, it remains just one theory among many others.

It’s also been wrongly taken by some to mean that cleanliness is bad for our health. But that just isn’t true either.

Good hygiene is needed to prevent the spread of really serious infections like E.coli and measles, but children do still need exposure to largely harmless microbes found in our everyday environment to prime their immune systems.

In 2003 Graham Rook also proposed something known as the Old Friends Mechanism where he proposed that phrase the germs we should be exposed to are not necessarily colds, flu, measles, norovirus etc, which have evolved relatively recently over the last 10,000 years, but rather the microbes we coevolved with when humans were still wearing loin cloths and living in caves.

Modern sanitation has led us to largely part ways with these old organisms, it is believed.

I’m not sure how we make friends once again with these so-called Old Friends, and I for one, don’t think going back to the days of open sewers is the best way of going about it – not that anyone is suggesting that.

But from what I have read, there is no such thing as being too clean; for example, the NHS website says no matter what we do to clean our homes, new germs will come straight back in on our bodies, pets etc. That’s bad news for self-confessed bleach bunny Hayley and the other regulars on Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners, but good news for us. It means that while cleanliness should reduce exposure to the real nasties, the good ol’ germs should still get through and get our immune systems revving nicely.

Of course, my take from what is a massive field of research is very basic.

But it does seem that no matter what you read, the message is: be clean but not too clean because some germs are good.

Unfortunately that’ll mean different things to different people, which I believe has led to some of the confusion and fear over vaccinations. There was also the now-debunked theory linking the MMR with autism.

I was disappointed to read that pupils at seven schools are now being vaccinated following an outbreak of measles at a high school in Newport.

Measles can kill and it still does every day. Complications can include meningitis, blindness, pneumonia.

According to the World Health Organisation before widespread vaccination began in the 1980s, it caused an estimated 2.6 million deaths every year. It remains one of the leading causes of death among young children globally.

Why would any parent want to expose their child to that? I have heard many parents say that their children need to get a certain amount of illnesses and yes, they do, but not that surely.

I’ve no shame in saying I’ve taken every vaccine going for Luke and he’s had no ill effects from them. Where I’ve probably gone wrong is trying to keep him too clean. I used to wipe his hands so much as a baby that when we first took him to the beach he couldn’t stand sand touching his hands.

My little playground outburst shows I’m still freaked out about him coming into contact with germs and also a timely sign that I need to ease off.

Perhaps if we as parents stop letting fear and the judgement of others rule us, we could once again relex enough to let kids be kids and roll in the mud while they lick their hands, while also accepting the benefits modern medicine has brought us.